The Woman With Fifty Faces

On April 7, 1928, Maria Lani blew into Paris claiming to be a famous German actress and proceeded to seduce the cultural elite with her undeniable charisma and strangely enticing enigmatic aura. She persuaded fifty artists – Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, Andre Derain, Henri Matisse, Georges – Henri Rouault, Fernand Leger and Suzanne Valadon among them – to immortalise her in paintings and sculptures, which would appear as an important plot device in a forthcoming film. Unveiled as an exhibition in New York, the artworks travelled to Chicago, London, Berlin, Rotterdam, and Paris. But, in 1931, as legend eventually had it, she and her husband Max Abramowicz vanished without a trace, and so did the art. The film was never made. The Woman With Fifty Faces is about uncovering as much of the truth about Maria Lani as possible. The images that cascade through the book are stunningly beautiful, deeply compassionate, and farcically grotesque, ca